Rough cuts

Had my first rough day at work today… and to be honest, it wasn’t the entire day. Just the last half.

I’d been assigned a pretty big task; to complete several large boards with pockets for an awards presentation. Every so often at Merrick Towle, we or our clients submit work to various award shows. Most often our clients do the “submitting”, but we put the materials together for the presentation. There were several components to this particular job; 3 Letramax Illustration boards mounted with images and pockets, 2 CDs with labels, and a set of inserts and a spine for a display book.

The worst of it is, I felt honored that my boss (Dinorah Coton) had trusted me with the job, so I tried really hard to pull it off. Kelli Mcnamara is one of the nicest Account Executives, and this was her job. She was extremely patient and forgiving too.

I’m not the best with comps and cutting stuff. I haven’t done any since college. But Dinorah and Patrick Physioc (her right hand man) have been very patient with me and have given me quite a number of jobs requiring comping to get me back in practice.
And to be honest, I’d been doing pretty well. I’d put together several brochures (we make mockups that look like the finished printed piece) and boards (mounted examples to show the client) and had done pretty well. Not perfect; I had to redo a WHOLE bunch of them… but once I figured out how it was done I was pretty good.

Not so with this project.

To begin with, the pockets were pretty complicated.
First, you start out with a the board.
You place whatever you want to put in the pocket (in my case, brochures) on the board exactly where you want it, and with a pencil you mark the bottom corners, giving about 1/16th of an inch of room (so it’s not too tight).
Then you measure a few inches up vertically from those marks and make two more marks. This will be the top of the pocket.
You then use these 4 marks to cut out a tab in the shape of the letter U, connecting the points with 3 cuts. This part is REALLY really hard, and is where I kept messing up. I’m so out of practice that every other cut I make isn’t as straight as the one before, and it takes maybe 6 or 7 cuts to get all the way through the Illustration board.
After that, you cut a piece of transparency plastic that is larger than your pocket, and lay it on the back of the board. Lifting up on the cut, you pry up the bottom of the tab, and slip the plastic inbetween the board and the tab. This way, from the front, it looks like you have filled up the U with the plastic.
The plastic on the back is then folded over in on itself, and you put tape down to cover the cracks.
You can then slide the material into the pocket on the front.

All in all, it doesn’t seem like much, but remember, I had to do three of them. At least, I was supposed to. Patrick ended up picking up each component of the project as I continually messed up.
After I got through the first (successful) pocket, it was so late in the day that Dinorah suggested Patrick doing the rest.
Then, as I worked on the book, nearly every linked image in it (about 80% of them) were missing; moved to different folders. So for each one, I had to search for them and link them back up in order to fix it. And I got so caught up in doing that, however, that I forgot to add three new pages that Kelli had asked me to put in. Once it was finally ready, the file was so bulky that it crashed my computer, and every other computer I tried to print it from.
Even the CD labels, something so simple, gave me trouble. For some reason I could not figure out how to get them to print correctly on the label sheets… and then when they finally did, the words didn’t fit on it, and Patrick had to re-do the whole thing.

I was very ashamed. Because of all this, we missed the courier and Dinorah had to hand deliver part of it.
I felt terrible about it.

Bob Henninger, our IT guru, swung by my desk as I was packing up, and I lamented my troubles to him.
“Well,” he growled, “Ya learned somthin’ NEW didn’t cha? That’s wot’s important…”
I nodded.
“Well then, ask Dinorah to give you more pocket boards.”
I looked up in surprise. “More.”
“@#$% yeah, more. Ya gotta get yer practice up. You wanna make her proud? Do more of it! Ev’rybody’s gonna hava rough day. You’ll be alright.”
I nodded.

Tamika cheered me up even more on the ride home.
I think I will ask for more…